ESRI UC – Thursday

Thursday morning I was up bright and early to walk around Balboa Park. It was so nice even though it was a little difficult to get to, it seems it is assumed everyone has a car in California. So even though I didn’t have much time to get out of the city, I was still able to go on a tiny bit of a nature walk.

Deploying ArcGIS Server in a Cloud Hosting Architecture

It’sall about cloud-computing. It seems we have a few options in regards to accessing “the cloud”. The esri session was mostly focused on the Amazon cloud, as ArcGIS10 supports Amazon but I also spoke to a company Arc2Earth that uses Google.

Getting started: can come out of the box as a deployment option. ESRI services will get you started

need to consider uptime needs

Common Deployments

Data Management – Geodatase

Planning and Analysis – Geoprocessing

Field Mobility – Mobile

Operational Awareness – Web APIs

Elasticity

can adjust for peaks and troughs

Customizable storage options

Won’t need racks and machines is using the cloud

can run desktop and server onsite which then push to servers on cloud

or can keep both desktop and server on cloud

can choose what to keep on cloud: development, staging, production, all or some

Increase time to market

Don’t have to wait for data center for infrastructure installation of code uploads

Cloud may not be reliable enough or secure enough

May not be compliant – what are your green standards

Subscription Sizes

Standard – 7.5 GB – 4 EC2

High CPU – 7 GB – 20 EC2

High Memory – 64 GB – 26 EC2

what is your budget? hourly rate

Thoughts: It seems we can’t have a conversation at EC today without talking about cloud-computing, which is why I went to these sessions. I have a bunch of take-away pamphlets and information to deliver to the decision-makers, as I am just a cog in the wheel 😉

Mobile GIS Applications

This session featured a bunch of case studies presented by esri developers and a company Accela, showing apps they have developed for various companies and communities in order to showcase the usefulness of mobile apps.

I won’t go into describing each app, as I don’t really see how that will be of help. I will just summarize the general take-aways of the session.

Main technology used:

ArcGIS Server

ArcGIS Engine

Network Extension

Accela Automation

Accela Mobile Office

Accela GIS

Advantages:

can eliminate the need for dual-entry of asset data

empowers field and office staff

mapcentric leveraging and single GIS environment

one solution – many departments

real-time updates

heightens time management

Thoughts: Generally the case studies where done for cities and states in the area of inspection and enforcement. The consolidated data aspect is huge for us, and I have links to all of these apps which will come in handy as I see this taking over a huge chunk of our projects. I’m sure if we had more people to do the work it already would have.

ArcGIS Server Performance and Scalability – Testing Methodologies

I attended this session in general interest to our group. But instead of blogging about it I will submit my notes to Langhi and Ali and discuss with them. We all know I’m the worlds worst tester…and add on the fact that we were talking about geodatabases and geoprocessing I was a little lost. So before i write up all the notes i took and put them out on the interweb, I’d like to ensure I actually understand them first 😉

Thursday night was the esri gala, an event everyone assured me I should not miss.